When Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Jr. cast the decisive fifth vote to uphold the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act in June, he did more than salvage Barack Obama’s signature legislation. He also insured that the Supreme Court would not become a significant issue in the presidential election. So both President Obama and Mitt Romney ignored the court during their first debate, just as they’ve been doing on the campaign trail.

For an inkling of what Obama and the Democrats would have been saying today but for Roberts’ vote, one need only look at what they actually did in the aftermath of oral arguments in that historic case.

Questions posed by the justices, coupled with a lackluster performance by the Solicitor General, led to widespread speculation that the court was going to strike down at least the individual mandate, if not the entire legislation.

That prompted nervous Democrats and the mainstream media to launch pre-emptive attacks on the court. The drumbeat was loud and escalating.

It was also dishonest.

Yet it was fodder for a gullible public, one that, according to poll after poll, knows next to nothing about the court or its justices.

Hence came daily gnashing of the teeth about how the court’s “conservative majority” had stolen the 2000 election from Al Gore.

And dire warnings that these “conservative activists” were going to politicize the court again, thwarting the will of the people this time by striking down a health-care law duly enacted by their elected representatives. Though an oft-repeated liberal refrain, there is currently no “conservative majority” on the Supreme Court. Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, a judicial moderate, straddles four liberal justices on one side and four conservatives on the other.

Independent and unpredictable, he’s cast the deciding vote in numerous politically-volatile cases. As for Bush v. Gore, it’s a source of continuing amazement that critics of that decision boldly ascribe political motives to the five justices in the majority, but make no such judgment against the four liberal dissenters who voted in favor of Gore.

As with so many thorny constitutional issues, reasonable arguments can be made in favor of either side in that landmark case. Kennedy obviously found those advanced by Bush to be more persuasive. Gore’s supporters may not have liked the result, but that does not make the legal reasoning behind it either unsound or politically motivated.

JUDICIAL ACTIVISM

Contrary to the Democrats’ claims, a ruling against the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act would not have been an instance of judicial activism by the court’s conservatives.

The Supreme Court has not only the right, but the duty to strike down legislation if it doesn’t pass constitutional muster. The health-care law presented serious, complex legal issues about which reasonable judges at various federal levels could and did disagree.

It was also the subject of a lively, ongoing debate among constitutional scholars. In other words, there were enough plausible reasons for the court to strike down the law without the justices having to invent phony ones.

The same cannot be said for the large body of case law generated over the years by liberal justices, most notably Chief Justice Earl Warren and company, not from the language of the Constitution itself, nor from a reasonable construction of it, but from their own personal beliefs about what the law should be.

That’s classic judicial activism, and it’s the antithesis of the judicial restraint with which conservative justices approach the resolution of cases. During last week’s vice-presidential debate between Joseph Biden and his Republican challenger, Paul Ryan, the two candidates spoke of the Supreme Court only after moderator Martha Raddatz asked them about abortion.

Ryan, consistent with his conservative philosophy, argued that the highly charged subject should not be resolved by unelected judges but, rather, by the “people through their elected representatives.”

Biden, however, jumped to the defense of the Supreme Court’s decision in Roe v. Wade, the most glaring example of judicial activism in its history.

Asserting that the court was “one or two Supreme Court nominees” away from overruling the decision - a lie that Democrats compulsively repeat - he charged that Mitt Romney would, if elected, appoint justices who would “outlaw abortion.”

It was yet another pitch to people’s ignorance of the judicial process. Even if the Supreme Court were to overturn Roe v. Wade some day in the distant future, it would not thereby “outlaw” abortion. Rather, resolution of the issue would be left to the individual states.

In New York, for example, where abortion has been legal by statute for over 40 years, such a ruling would have no effect whatsoever.

Given bleak economic conditions at home and several worrisome developments abroad, it’s understandable that the president’s sweeping power of appointment over all federal judgeships has received little attention in the campaign.

At the same time, although the Supreme Court is philosophically balanced right now, it could tilt decidedly to the left or the right for decades with just a single new appointment. And that’s definitely something worth keeping in mind.

[Daniel Leddy’s column appears each Tuesday on the Advance Editorial Page. His e-mail address is JudgeLeddy@si.rr.com.]